The shame! The party invitations you’d have to turn down out of crimson-faced embarrassment. The once-proudly-affixed stickers you’d have to peel from your car in the middle of the night, for fear of unbearable public abuse.

The tattoo of Theo Walcott’s face that would cost hundreds of pounds to have removed by lasers from your penitent back. Seven years without a trophy. Poor, poor Arsenal. It must be a bit like supporting practically any other football team.

It’s only in the hyper-tribal world of online discourse that any Arsenal supporter would pretend to feel such levels of suffering at merely qualifying for Europe’s premier club competition year after year.

In that same online arena we’ve seen gloomy words from supporters this week about the club’s soul being violently ripped from its moorings, players lacking the fitness levels to wear the shirt, and seemingly sincere offers to drive Andrei Arshavin to his next club.

It’ll probably be in Russia, which is quite a long way away, so you get some idea of how upset they are.

Even Arsène Wenger, paragon of maddening “we will learn from this” rhetoric after miserable performances, turned on his players after their 4-0 defeat to Milan.

“We were very poor offensively and defensively,” he said. “The result is a disaster.”

Such severity is understandable in the context of Arsenal’s performance at the San Siro, which was somewhere between abject and exactly what you’d expect from a team pinning its hopes on its best player from 10 years ago.

If Chelsea were forced to field Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink up front instead of Fernando Torres… Well, they’d probably have more goals.

The point stands that these are lean times for Arsenal. In such periods of footballing famine it helps to maintain a sense of perspective. No-one likes to be in decline, but Arsenal supporters could have things so much worse.

Ask fans of Rangers, Portsmouth, Coventry, Darlington, practically any other football team.

Supporters of the biggest clubs tend to tread a path of three Es: expectation, exceptionalism and entitlement.

A period of success raises expectation that winning things is the norm, as it is maintained fans begin to believe their club is special in some way, destined for success, the chosen children of the Premier League, and eventually that they are in entitled to carry on winning things forever. No team is.

Arsenal certainly have a stronger claim than most for exceptionalism, but we only need to look back 20 years to see how fleeting such identities are.

Then they were hoofball merchants with a penchant for trotting forward in grim unison with impeccably raised arms. Now they are known for games with more sideways passes than the annual Wilkins family rugby fixture. Times change, teams change.

The bafflingly intense reactions from supporters online go hand in hand with a relationship with football that’s based on watching on television rather than in person.

Discourse during or afterwards sinks to the familiar bilious binary of the internet, and reactions are amplified to compensate for the shouting that would have been done at the game.

If you’re a longstanding match-attending supporter of a team it’s easier to realise that success is cyclical, and there are more important things than winning trophies.

Trophies. This tiresome obsession with trophies. “How many trophies has he won?” It’s trotted out as a witless argument-ender by football internet bores in any discussion about the relative merits of teams, managers or players.

Few of football’s most evocative moments are built on trophies. How many trophies did Ronnie Radford win? Or the mid-90s Newcastle side?

They’re more fondly remembered by supporters than Henning Berg, owner of three Premier League medals.

While these are not vintage years to be an Arsenal supporter, they will inevitably have another day in the sun. For supporters of once-glorious clubs like Nottingham Forest or Leeds United those days may never return.

It would benefit Arsenal fans if they could consider that next time they’re complaining that their team is only quite good. Nothing irritates quite like the whine­­ of the privileged.